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Debra and Lyla Jane
by Memphis Saltos Until I was eight years old I hung out at the LSU campus. When my father had classes I would play on the parade grounds and look for four-leaf clovers, I'd roll down the Indian mounds and try out my cartwheels, or whistle through a blade of grass. I went to a rich white kid school during the day (not sure how my parents finagled that for me since we lived in a poor area) where I was rotten; I was stuck in remedial reading and failed Math. My mother said that in those years I was a pistol, mischievous, always running away from school and into busy streets and around unknown corners. I was always alone. When my dad graduated we bought a house in a tiny town where the biggest retail establishment was a five and dime. Suddenly at school I was considered the well-educated one. I still didn't have friends, but there were kids sorrier and lonelier than I was. I remember the lonely misfit lessons I learned at the rich white school so when it came time to pick partners I chose the two people no one else wanted to associated with: Debra and Lyla Jane. Debra was black and studious and had been oddly separated from her other black friends in another class. Remember, Louisiana was twenty years behind the nation in practically every way you can think of (except the rate of dropouts and teen pregnancies) so although civil rights and desegregation had already happened along time ago, Debra arrived at school in a separate bus than we (whites) did. The lines rarely mixed. I never questioned it for some reason. Lyla Jane wore the same clothes several days in a row. Her hair was never combed. Her mother, the largest woman I had ever seen (and since! which says a LOT), never gave her money for lunch so I would buy 5 cent Krispee Kreme donuts for her. Lyla lived in a trailer with a broken cinderblock post so the entire structure slanted down one corner. I used to imagine that was where her mother sat, day after day, watching Another World, causing cinderblocks to break under her enormous weight. Debra and Lyla Jane became my friends, but they weren't friends with each other. One particular day with Lyla and Debra sunk its hooks deep into my memory: We were going on a class trip to the Audubon Zoo; I was so excited that I had two actual friends to sit with rather than being stuck with the teacher and the boy that simultaneously picked his nose with his pinky finger while twirling his hair with his index finger on the same hand. I still remember so clearly Lyla coming up to me that day, her hair stuck out all over her head and the little defiant expression on her freckled face as she told me "My momma won't let me sit next to Debra." "Why?" I asked repeatedly. "Because momma said she's a nigger." "What's that? Why?" I kept asking. I find it hard to believe I was so innocent at one time. So ignorant. "You gotta sit between us or I can't sit wid you at all." I sat in between Debra and Lyla the entire 2 hour trip, shielding Lyla from whatever she might get from Debra. At the time I was more selfishly mad that I never got to share the coveted spot next to the window; though from time to time I would glance at Debra worriedly to see if she caught on. Her face was shiny and dark and her blank expression didn't change throughout the ride. Her eyes stared out ahead like they were made out of glass. Lyla Jane moved away after that year and I never saw her again. Debra started hanging out with her own friends. We'd pass each other in the halls and smile, but never were close friends again. There is no doubt that my family never really fit in rural Louisiana, and that we were always outsiders; for us the town was excluding and impenetrable. But the kind of prejudice Debra suffered I never knew then, or since. |
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